Read The Last September Online
Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September (3 page)
“Well,” he said, looking roound the room.
“Well, Hugo … isn’t it lovely?”
“Richard’s in great form—I thought I’d never get up at all to you—Not tired?”
“Indeed, no … Doesn’t it all seem the same as ever?”
“I tell you one thing: Myra’s ageing. Didn’t you notice?”
“Oh,” said Francie vaguely. She stooped her face to the basin. The rain-water comforted, creeping into the pores. “
Oh
!” she deprecated. She dried her face in damask, among stiff roses. “But then, we all are.”
“She’s got into a terrible habit of shutting doors.”
“Times have been worse down here. Yes, I thought, you know, she had rather a strained look. What does Richard know of the situation?… Oh, and had you any idea that Lois was so grown up? I had imagined her quite a schoolgirl. She’s so pretty, such a…a frank little face.”
“She’s self-conscious,” said Hugo, “but I daresay most girls of that age are … I should lie down now for a bit, it will freshen you up though you don’t need it. Then would you like me to brush your hair?”
Francie got her dressing-gown out of a trunk and lay down on the sofa. She had just relaxed there when Hugo said that the sofa did not look comfortable and she had better lie on the bed. He made a valley for her head between the two pillows—he did not believe it rested anybody to lie with their head high—and she lay down on the bed with her head in the valley. “Oh, but I don’t think I ought to lie on this lovely quilt,” she soon protested.
“They’re not fussy here,” returned Hugo, “do lie and be still.”
So she lay and watched him begin to unpack her two boxes, carry dresses over his arms and lay them along the shelves of the “gentleman’s wardrobe.” She wondered: whatever would Richard and Myra think?—“Uxorious” they would be bound to declare; Richard who could hardly handle a jug without dropping it, and Myra who would not have him otherwise.
“What a disgusting noise,” said Hugo, pausing and listening.
“Somebody playing a gramophone—”
They might well say she had taken the brilliant young man he’d once been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her dresses. And she knew she could, now, never explain to Myra what she years ago—when there had been so much less to justify —how Hugo was too much for her altogether. How she had tried, but had not been able, to keep him—first from marrying her, then giving up Canada, leaving his friends when she had to go to the south of France or brushing her hair in the evenings.
“Hugo, you might leave think I’ll wear it …
When
was it you were in love
with Laura?”
“When I was twenty-two
—I was in a sort of way.
She was lovely then—though indeed she was always lovely. But she was never happy at all, even here. She she was very vital.”
He hesitated over two pairs of evening shoes. “Leave the bronze ones out,” she suggested. “They go with the blue.” She lay with her eyes shut a moment, then asked, “But why wouldn’t she marry you?”
Francie’s delicacy, her absences from him, her long queer relapses into silence gave her the right to ask curious things, as from a death-bed. Hugo, wandering at the end of the bed, looked at her feet thoughtfully.
“She wanted her mind made up,” he said at last, “and I couldn’t do that—why should I? I had enough to do with my own mind. And she was Richard’s own sister—talk and talk and you’d never know where you had her. And if she thought you had her, she’d start a crying-fit. Then she went up North ane met
Farquar, and I imagine that that was all fixed up before she knew where she was or had time to get out of it. After that of course she really
had
got something to be unhappy about. Yet I don’t believe things ever really mattered to Laura. Nothing got close to her: she was very remote.”
“I wonder if Lois is remote?”
“What I think I felt about Laura,” pursued Hugo, interested, “was, she was never real in the way I wanted. Nobody was before you, as you know … If you get up now, I can brush your hair.”
“It is very dusty,” said Mrs. Montmorency.
She had met Laura in England and been very shy of her. Laura was a success in England and so quite brilliant—she was too Irish altogether for her own country. Lois had been at school as usual and did not come home because Laura had forgotten which day the Montmorencys were coming. Six months afterwards, without giving anyone notice of her intention, Laura had died.
“It still seems odd,” remarked Mrs. Montmorency, “that I shouldn’t have met Lois.” Seating herself in front of the glass she took out the pins one by one, then shook down her hair round her face—bright bronze threads went in and out, crisply, over the light grey waves. She ran it through with her finger-tips, shaking her head ruefully. But the dust seemed to have gone, perhaps because she was happier, less tired; or perhaps she had left a drift of it between the two pillows. Her husband, selecting a brush, knocked over the vase of geraniums. “The darlings!” she cried out, mopping with her kimono-sleeve.
“Confusion,” said Hugo, shaking water out of the brush, “on all who put vases on dressing-tables!”
LOIS, dressed for dinner, was tidying her writing-table; two stamped letters, her handiwork, leaned on the clock. She shook out her pink suède blotter and started to sort its contents, but had to re-
read everything. Gerald, who had written about a tournament, concluded: “You have the loveliest soft eyes.” She was perplexed, thought: “But what can I do?” and snapped the letter under a rubber band. Then she pulled out a drawer called “general” and swept the rest into it. She had a waste-paper basket, but only for envelopes. Strokes of the gong, brass bubbles, came bouncing up from the hall. She ran to the glass, changed a necklace, had an apprehensive interchange with her own reflection. What of the night?
Mrs. Montmorency and Lawrence were in the drawing-room. They looked anxious, nothing showed the trend of the conversation. The pale room rose to a height only mirrors followed above the level of occupation; this disproportionate zone of emptiness dwarfed at all times figures and furniture. The distant ceiling imposed on consciousness its blank white oblong, and a pellucid silence, distilled from a hundred and fifty years of society, waited under the ceiling. Into this silence voices went up in stately attenuation. Now there were no voices: Mrs. Montmorency and Laurence sat looking away from each other.
As Lois came in Laurence slapped his pockets over and saying something about a pipe left the room quickly, leaving Lois in the grip of a
tete-a-tete.
Mrs. Montmorency, seated in a window, held by a corner a copy of the
Spectator
that had slipped down against the silk of her dress, as though she must be sure to retain this constant refuge from conversation. Vague presence, barely a silhouette, the west light sifting into her fluffy hair and lace wrappings so that she half melted, she gave so little answer to one’s inquiry that one did not know how to approach. So Lois stood staring, full in the light.
“Oh you do look sweet!” exclaimed the visitor. “Black is so striking. No, you are not like Laura—I don’t know who you’re like.”
“Aunt Myra isn’t sure about black for girls,” said Lois, sweeping forward for admiration the folds of her dress. “But a white slip lightens it.”
“And I expect you are having a wonderful time now you’re grown up.”
“Oh, well…” said Lois. She went across to the fireplace and rose on her tiptoes, leaning her shoulders against the marble. She tried to not look conscious. She still felt a distant pride at having grown up at all, which seemed an achievement like marriage or fame. Having a wonderful time, she knew, meant being attractive to a number of young men. If she said, “Yes, I do,” it implied, “Yes, I am very—” and she was not certain. She was not certain, either, how much she enjoyed herself. “Well, yes, I do,” she said finally.
“Tell me,” Mrs.
Montmorency continued, “wasn’t that your cousin Laurence?”
“As a matter of fact I am Uncle Richard’s niece and he Aunt Myra’s nephew.”
“And isn’t he very intellectual?”
“I suppose he is, really.”
“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Montmorency, I had no idea how to talk to him. I suppose
you’d
never find that difficult. I expect now, Lois, you’re
very modern.”
“Oh well, not really,” said Lois, pleased. Mrs. Montmorency’s expression, condensing now from her outline, was of such affection and interest that Lois was moved to go on: “You could talk to him really about almost anything except politics. He isn’t allowed any here because the ones he brings over from Oxford are all wrong.”
“Wrong?”
cried the visitor putting up a hand to her face the mounting colour. “Wrong which way? How do you mean ‘wrong’?”
“Inconvenient.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Montmorency. And upon a recurrence of the puzzled silence that had been the
note of Lois’s entrance, Sir Richard was very much worried by visitors who down early for dinner: evidently he had not expected this of Francie. “Oh!” he exclaimed reproachfully. “This is too bad; I had no idea you were down. Myra’s been delayed—you know yourself how it happens.”
“Indeed yes,” said Francie warmly. She would never have been in time herself if she had had a home of her own. Only the little blanks and rifts in her life accounted for her punctuality.
Sir Richard, touching his tie vaguely, wandered about about the room, displacing with some irritation the little tables that seemed to spring up in his path, in the pent-up silence of a powerful talker not yet in gear.
“Very fine weather,” he said at last, “warm at nights—or would you like me to shut that window?” He was bothered; he could not remember how well he had once known Francie, or decide at just what degree of intimacy he was expected to pick her up again. “Lois has grown up, hasn’t she?” he continued, pointing out his niece with an air of inspiration. “She seems to me to have grown up very fast. Now how long is it since you saw her over in England?”
“But I never did see her.”
“That was extraordinary,” said Sir Richard, looking from one to the other. “Didn’t you meet poor Laura?”
“I did, but Lois was out.”
“That was too bad.” Sir Richard’s bother increased, with a suspicion of something somewhere. He observed rather flatly, “Then it can hardly be such a surprise to you that she’s grown up.”
“Not in the same way.”
“We can all sit out on the steps tonight,” said Lois, determined to check the couple in their career of inanity. She went across to a window and folded her arms on the sill.
The screen of trees that reached like an arm from behind the house—embracing the lawns, banks and terraces in mild ascent—had darkened, deepening into a forest. Like splintered darkness, branches pierced the faltering dusk of leaves. Evening drenched the trees; the beeches were soundless cataracts. Behind the trees, pressing in from the open and empty country like an invasion, the orange bright sky crept and smouldered. Firs, bearing up to pierce, melted against the brightness. Somewhere, there was a sunset in which the mountains lay like glass.
Dark had so gained the trees that Lois, turning back from the window, was surprised at how light the room was. Day still coming in from the fields by the south windows was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone. Mr. Montmorency had come in and was standing where she had stood with his shoulders against the mantelpiece.
“We
can
sit out on the steps tonight, can’t we?” persisted Lois. And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. “I must break in on all this,” she thought as she looked round the room.
“Do you still go to sleep after dinner?” she asked Mr. Montmorency.
“It’s a thing that I never have done,” he said annoyed.
“But it’s what I chiefly remember about you.”
“I’m afraid,” he said, tolerant, “you are mixing me up with someone else.”
“Listen, Richard—” said Francie. “Are you sure we will not be shot at if we sit out late on the steps?”
Sir Richard laughed and they all shared his amusement. “We never have yet, not even with soldiers here and Lois dancing with officers up and down the avenue. You’re getting very English, Francie! Isn’t Francie getting very English? Do you think, maybe
we ought to put sandbags behind the shutters when we shut up at nights?”
“No, but, Richard, seriously—” began Franciethen, as they all stared, laughed and had to give up to go on laughing. Now in County Carlow they had told her things were so bad round here that she made a grave mistake in coming at all. But then, as Richard would certainly say, that was County Carlow all over.
Lady Naylor came in arm-in-arm with Laurence and said they were all very punctual. “The gong’s only gone three minutes, also I could be certain I never heard any of you go down. But I was delayed, as I told Richard to tell you. Shall we go in?”
“Francie wants to know,” said Sir Richard offering Francie his arm, “If we haven’t got a machine gun?”
“Ah, you’re too bad!”
“Do
you dance on the avenue?” said Mr. Montmorency to Lois.
“Only once, for a bet. I and a man called Mr. Lesworth danced to the white gate, and the man that we had the bet with walked after us carrying the gramophone. But naturally, I don’t as a rule.”